Category: Trade Editions

First released by Gothic Image Publishers in Europe and by Weiser in the US and Canada in 1999, this book was long out of print until Papaveria released this new edition in 2012.

The Glastonbury Tarot is a blending of philosophical traditions that take the reader through the Pagan, Christian and Arthurian stories associated with the mystical Isle of Avalon. This companion book to The Glastonbury Tarot cards clearly and concisely describes the history, symbolism and divinatory meanings of the 78 cards. Each image reveals a step along the path of the soul’s journey, and gently guides the reader towards deeper self-understanding.

The book includes black and white images of all 78 cards, and a foreword by Michael Eastwood. It does not include the cards themselves.

Lisa Tenzin-Dolma is the author of 16 books, and her visionary paintings have been widely exhibited. She created The Glastonbury Tarot while living in Glastonbury. Lisa is the author of 16 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and is also a qualified Canine Psychologist and the director of The International School of Canine Psychology. Lisa was awarded Doctor of Philosophy in Humanities by Moffett University in 2009. You can find out more about Lisa and her work at http://www.tenzindolma.co.uk.

Do you know how to flirt in Faerieland? C.S.E. Cooney does. In this collection of seventeen poems — four never before published — you’ll find goblins, crones, robber brides, coyotes, and even a sea king. Cooney draws from folklore and myth to create something entirely her own, something glimpsed only in Faerie. From the raucous and bawdy to the sorrowful dirge, these poems will work upon you like a spell. Inside you’ll find seven original illustrations by artist/tattooist Rebecca Huston, who also provided the artwork used on the cover.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction by Amal El-Mohtar

“There is a step missed in the title to this collection—a question that should have been asked. How, the canny traveller to places strange might ask, ought I to behave in the Land of Faerie?

Comes our own C.S.E. Cooney’s answer, sure as dawn: Flirt. And then she demonstrates.

Faerie Land returns our desires like a mischievous mirror. Hunger for it, and it consumes you; shun it, and it will stalk you; but flirt with it, meet it in a twilit land of halves, offer nothing that is quite whole or wholesome, and it may well flirt back.”

“This is a poetry collection like no other I’ve ever read. Cooney marries the old and the new, the trad and the out-there, the lyrical and the bawdy, the beautiful and the creep-creep-creepy. Many of her poems suggest melodies, just in reading aloud. And many of them made me laugh out loud.” — DELIA SHERMAN, author of The Freedom Maze and winner of the Mythopoeic Award (1994) for The Porcelain Dove.

“Cooney is drunk on words, and we readers drink a toast to her as well.” — JANE YOLEN, winner of the Grand Master Award from SFPA, the Science Fiction/Fantasy Poetry Association.

“A headlong romp through a fey countryside peopled with goblins and bogles and the stray Robber Bride. C.S.E. Cooney piles up words and rhymes and glittering images like so much sea glass on the shore. Sublime, sublime-o.” – SHARON SHINN, author of The Shape-Changer’s Wife (among many others) and winner of the William C. Crawford Award for Outstanding New Fantasy Writer (1996).

“C.S.E. Cooney is the only poet I can think of who can make rhyming lines get up off the page and kick your ass. Clever, sexy, wistful, wicked, absolutely hilarious. People will tell you that the Rhysling-winning “The Sea-King’s Second Bride” is worth the price of the book. I’m not telling you they’re wrong. I’m adding that the same could be said of most any of the other poems collected here.” — NICOLE KORNHER-STACE, author of The Winter Triptych & Desideria.

“Wicked delights pounce from every page, calling forth a thousand perilous giggles and repeated sighs of agreement from those who dare plumb this sweet cache of cunningly crafted words! I felt such shivers and such simultaneous comfort as I rocked between the poet’s ruthless sense of rhyme and her deft navigation of both old- and new-world bardic rhythms. There is no sweeter ride than this.” — S.J. TUCKER, musician and songstress whose albums include Michief, Sirens, Tangles, and more.

“At first I felt strongly that How to Flirt in Faerieland required a soundtrack. The opening poems are unabashedly ballads, with strange narrative gaps for the imagination to fill in, nonsense words in the choruses, rhythms that seem not quite right but that you understand would fall perfectly if only you knew the tune or an antique
pronunciation of some of the words. Some of the poems are wild, some moving, some a wonderfully unsettling amalgam of the nastier Child ballads and Lewis Carroll. You read on, looking for the elusive tunes that will make them settle down.

But they won’t settle; this is not that kind of book. None of these first poems is entirely serious nor entirely frivolous. Rather, the verses rocket back and forth between extremes, veering sideways into sentiment, lyrical description, satire, and sheer joyous goofiness. And for all their lovely, fractured ballad form, these are contemporary poems, almost every one with a sudden twist away from any traditional story they may evoke or pretend to be imitating. Women have agency; if they are in distress, they decide what to do about it; they are irate and cunning and tender and uncompromising and clever and sarcastic and foolish and wise.

And just as you get the rhythm, in step, out of step, back in again, it all changes. Here’s a piece of blank verse with intervals of natural dialogue and an abrupt, emotionally harrowing ending. And then here’s a piece of free verse, the best kind, seeming effortless but every word put just so, a horror story where, after the horror, when the supernatural begins, rhymes creep in also.

And then, when you have caught your breath in one way and lost it in another, the songs come back for three poems or so, including a huge narrative of whales and bone and terror. After that, there’s “Love Song to Beowulf,” probably the single most personal and sensuous description of reading anything that one is ever likely to run across. Then gardens and peach jam; and then, astonishing, lavish and stark at once, a science-fiction fairy tale, the elements not separable, the conclusion so startling and right at once that tears start to your eyes: “The Last Crone on the Moon.”

I wanted the book to end there and I didn’t. The book does not end there. It slips back into song again, to “The Sea-King’s Second Bride,” a long intricate narrative veering wildly from ancient to modern, from terrifying to hilarious, from rhyme to free verse, and back again, to a profoundly satisfying conclusion. And you realize, this time, that you know the tune and how to dance to it. So then you start all over again and read the whole book from the beginning.” — PAMELA DEAN, winner of the Mythopoeic Award (1992) for her novel, Tam Lin.

Shiny Thing blurs the lines between fantasy, horror and science fiction. The stories inside are suffused with magic and danger, and will sometimes chill you to the bone. With a delicate touch Patricia Russo reveals humanity in all of its foibles and glorious moments, in settings that range from the perfectly average to the absolutely sublime. You can never be quite sure who is the monster and who is the heroine, and sometimes there is no divide. The characters are people you know, yet they do things you would never expect, and within each story there is one shining thing that somehow changes them all. You know the old saying — all that glitters is not gold. Well sometimes, all that is gold does not glitter. In Shiny Thing, your life depends on being able to tell the difference.

Patricia Russo had her first professional short story, “True Love”, published in 1987 in the anthology Women of Darkness: Original Horror and Dark Fantasy by Contemporary Women Writers, edited by Kathryn Ptacek. Since then her work has appeared in Lone Star Stories, Electric Velocipede, Abyss and Apex, Talebones, Tales of the Unanticipated, Not One of Us, in the anthologies Corpse Blossoms and Zencore, and in many other fine publications. She is that rarest of authors: she has no website, no blog, nothing on the internet to indicate that she even exists — except for a trail of fiction that reveals the prolific and generous writer behind the name. This is her first collection of short stories.